How Sonarplatform CEO Amien Krisna grew to $900K revenue and 75 customers in 2019.

hello everybody my guest today is amy and krishna he began his career in web-based application development designing and producing digital marketing campaigns from the early days of the web today he's founder and ceo of sonar platform a conversational analytics company focusing on producing automated insights from social media conversations he helps customers keep up with competition by improving their sales marketing and customer care through automated analytics amy are you ready to take us to the top sure let's go all right so talk to me about sonar what's the company do and how do you make money so basically uh what we do is we uh monitor track and analyze social media conversations and all that all that conversational data goes into a dashboard in the dashboard you know our customers can you know log in and they can see what kinds of uh trends are going on with their company they can see how their company is perceived on social media they can also uh you know generate um automated powerpoint reports so they don't have to go through all the trouble of looking through the data they can just you know uh you know generate um automated summaries to get a review on how their company is doing on social media basically and and so is it a sas platform exactly yes so our customers um i charge a monthly fee which is unlimited by the number of data they consume okay it's a very skillful app so on average what's the customer pay-per-month would you say um so packages start around 500 usd and that that can go up to a wide level package which they can pay um up to ten thousand fifteen thousand dollars a month okay but would you say a fair average is like six hundred seven hundred a month yeah basically around thousand you know we're just hitting a thousand this month okay a thousand a month that's great and when did you launch the company what year so we actually launched it in 2015 2015 and how many customers have you scaled to today uh currently we have around 75 active customers um usually we target the medium to large companies that's great i mean i can take 75 times a thousand bucks a month on average you're doing about 75 grand a month right now in revenue yeah yeah yeah and where are you where were you a year ago so a year ago we were half that we've you know um actually grown double this year so um and we are growing uh on an average of double every you know every every year basically so yeah it's uh the company is you know scaling good good all right so doubling year over year it means about a year ago you're doing what 35 grand a month something like that yeah yeah uh what should we do around uh 25 grand actually yeah and are you driving this all this growth bootstrapped or have you raised capital uh we raised capital back in 2016 but a very small uh you know seed amount how much about 150 000. okay 150 and now it's from local investors there in indonesia or somewhere else uh local investors all that's great no where where are you getting most of this growth from i mean how did you get your first 10 customers um so i come from an agency background so what we did is we experimented the platform with my um aec customers so we ran we ran free trials with them you know for a couple of months and then we got to know what the customers actually wanted and then we basically we started scaling by simply word of mouth so we haven't had any really uh any significant marketing drives you know in the last one you know one or two years yeah but like obviously you don't have word of mouth when you have no customers at the start so tell me specifically like how did you get the first customer so the first company uh the first class we got was actually an experiment with some of my uh existing you see clients so sorry you're existing white clients agency clients oh you're in an agency yeah before this i was running an agency for like you know 10 years so we experimented with some of our existing customers and you know just just got to know their needs from you know from that so it was a free play at the beginning as we were just starting requirements um how many people are at the company today currently we have 32 people that's great and are you guys burning capital or about break even uh this year we came into the profit actually oh it's great yeah that's great it's okay so profitable any plans to raise capital or no um we just closed our next fund actually um so we started racing a couple months ago and we're just in the final stages of closing our next round that's great how much are you trying to raise um currently we were trying to raise a million just for uh just for either pre-a play you know just uh just to get you know the growth up a little bit more and ideally kind of what valuation would you hope to raise that at um five million actually no five million free money yeah yeah that's that's that's pretty healthy what about churn turns critical in a sas company what are you guys at uh currently we are at an average turn around uh we're still around seven to eight percent a month okay logo churn per month yeah and i mean what are you trying to do to get that down that's obviously high churn yeah so what we're trying to do is we're trying to um basically um uh plug in features that add a sticky factor to the e-platform so what we're trying to do is um we're trying to enhance our data training so our customers get a full benefit of [Music] the system knowing their company knowing their data so that will impede them to move to uh other companies since i already have um you know months and years for the trading data with us and this trading data is used to enhance our sentiment um in india so that's yeah that's you know so basically we're just trying to create your sticky factors to keep our customers with us you know for the following yeah but like is there something specific you know you have to get them to do in the first 30 days when they install like sign up to get them to be sticky yeah uh so basically what we do is uh we have an account team that uh that gives them an on-board process so we've enhanced this onboarding process um you know within the first month and we're we are also um trying to get as much um background data from them in order to enhance um our sentiment analysis accuracy you know three lovely customers so we feel that if we can get this up you know the customers will you know stick us since they already have a history of training that with them yep and yeah and walking through kind of fully weighted cac today so to get a new customer that's going to pay you what a thousand bucks a month what are you spending currently we we're only spending on basic uh seo and our b2b sales team so quickly um i can't go into details so how much you spend on our sales team but we we don't have any significant marketing push so the com our current customers only come from our website yeah but fully weighted cac you would include obviously hard and fixed costs related to salaries and rents and things like that so like fully weighted cat what you'd say is about what um our last my last calculation would uh would be like uh 150 150 to 200 to get it wait 200 to get a new thousand dollar a month customer yeah currently um it's you know it's it's quite high so we're trying to get that down you know wait wait how is that high 200 to get a new customer that pays you a thousand dollars a month yeah how is that how is that high well um according you know you know to what i've seen um in the united but uh states you know in you know in my uh you'd be in the scene i still kind of hi at the moment okay just to be clear you're spending 200 to get a new customer that pays you a thousand dollars a month so your payback period is less than a month yeah yeah so how is that hi most people spend 12 months of acv to get a customer okay well that's something that i didn't know so yeah so that's um that's what's happening there but how are you only spending 200 bucks a month i mean if a salesperson closes a 12 000 deal their commission is more than 200 bucks a month on that usually um currently um we don't give that high commissions but here you know uh we we have the luxury of you know indonesia you know the labor costs are quite low so um so that they're going to bring us down our overall cost for sales yeah but how many customers are you adding per month on average um currently we're adding uh i've i haven't seen my data yet but but currently we're adding uh like 10 15 customers a month so that's that's yeah and of your 32 people on the team how many of them are sales uh how do we only have three sales people from them okay so three sales people closing kind of 10 accounts per month if if that's the case i mean you can kind of back into right so that's three people adding 10 000 a month in terms of mrr and you're paying them just to be clear you're paying them 600 200 each commission um actually you know less than that actually well i i don't understand i mean is this just a cost of labor thing that i'm not understanding that's like ridic that's like that's like cheaper than dirt cheap yeah they could go sell something via an affiliate amazon link and make more than that yeah i i have to i have to get back you have to get back with you with those numbers but yeah that's uh that's the last numbers i've you detect actually you know because when we have a very uh we have only a very small sales team and well i get that but what commission what commission do you pay your sales people like ten percent of the first year sale or what oh no no we only uh pay him um two to three percent okay two okay two to three percent of the sale that's correct i mean that's crazy i've never heard of a commission that low how are you able to retain those employees uh they have a fixed salary cost of course uh well of course but usually sales people there's a fix there's a base plus commission yeah yeah uh so they're so so the best commission's is around two to two three percent that's uh so that's your favorite okay well look cac right there then is 360 bucks someone paying a thousand bucks a month is twelve thousand a year three percent of that is 360 bucks of cac so that already is above your 200 number you gave me earlier ah yeah yeah yeah yeah well well um i have to after you recalculate that okay so you know just to be clear you can say you don't know you don't know your cac yeah yeah yeah yeah you're not you're not measuring it um okay great where's the team based uh all the team is based in indonesia okay right there okay very good indonesia that's great and the capital you're raising right now is it from indonesian investors or did you have to travel to raise uh in indonesia basically that's great very good amen all right man let's uh let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book business book is uh good to great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying ceo uh basically um since i'm you know 40 my my idol is still basically in a bill gates from the old school number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business online tool um is that collaboration tool or you know basically you know uh maherto's base camp because we use that quite often number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um normal uh seven hours and what's your situation married single kids um separated basically okay any kiddos yes what one kid and how are you uh 10 years old 30 uh i'm 40 oh 40. okay great last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um the uh time it makes to build a startup guys it takes longer than you think again launched sonar back a couple years ago now working with that was back in 2015 now working with 75 customers paying a grand a month so 75 grand in terms of mrr uh there that's from 25 grand a month just a year ago first customer was an experiment he ran with one of his old agency clients and then obviously spun out the sas they raised 150 grand profitable 32 people in indonesia seven percent logo churn per month not measuring cac right now about to raise another million dollars at a 5 million dollar pre-money evaluation amy and thank you for taking us to the top thank you nathan